29 April 2013. A World to Win News Service. Bangladeshi garment workers have suffered yet another tragedy and outrage, this time in the industrial suburb of Savar, 30 kilometres outside of Dhaka. Those who first arrived on the scene could see mangled body parts amid the mangled metal and concrete and hear calls for help from those trapped in the ruins. As of 29 April, the bodies of more than 380 people have been found in the ruins of the Rana Plaza. Most were crushed to death by the collapse of the building where they worked. Several hundred people are still missing. Over 1,200 have been injured, many with loss of limbs. Four days after the collapse a fire broke out on one of the floors, putting an end to the barely audible voices still crying out to be saved. Rescue workers wept after coming so close but ultimately failing to save a trapped woman they had been talking to. After days of working through the rubble with bare hands and small tools, and with the passage of time dimming hope, the heavy construction machinery brought contributed to sharply deducing hopes for finding more survivors.

Officials noted a crack in the walls of the eight-storey building on 23 April, and people were evacuated. The shops and a bank on the ground floor stayed closed on the next day. But factories owners threatened their employees to go back to work or face being docked a day’s pay or worse. At 9 am, one hour into the day’s start, a huge noise was heard as the back end of the building caved in and the storeys collapsed one on another, burying more than 3,000 workers, mainly women.

Over the next several days, racing against time, relatives and local residents helped rescuers sift through the mountains of unstable rubble as the voices of buried survivors became increasingly faint – tugging, pulling and easing out bodies as the death toll mounted. Thousands of local people rushed to the inundated hospitals to donate blood for the survivors.

Occasional moments of hope would occur when rescuers tried to smash through a slab of a concrete wall, and heard a voice call out: “‘Help, get me out, cut off my legs but just get me out of here.’ The woman’s desperate voice was later joined by dozens more – up to 40 men and women who had been trapped together in the corner of a third floor room which had somehow survived the collapse of four floors on top of it. As they were led out of their tomb some wept and shook.” (25 April 2013, Telegraph)

As the death toll rose hundreds of thousands of furious workers went on strike. They blocked major motorways outside Dhaka and laid siege to the main manufacturers’ association demanding that those responsible be punished. In some areas cars were set on fire and factories forced to shut down. Demonstrations spread as far as the port city of Chittagong. Part of the intense outrage stems from the frequency with which lives have been snuffed out by the dangerous working conditions that are business as usual in the Bangladesh garment industry. When the police fired rubber bullets at the demonstrators, the crowd became even more outraged at being attacked for their righteous anger.

The Rana Plaza was constructed on marshy land in violation of zoning regulations, with improper foundations. It had been constructed with eight floors and a ninth floor in the building stages, despite only having permission for six. But enforcement is lax. Although the law includes the possibility of jail for violating workplace health-and-safety provisions, infractions mainly result in paltry fines or nothing at all. The Rana Plaza’s owner, caught trying to escape to India, has been arrested along with other individuals, among them factory owners who forced employees back to work and engineers responsible for the building’s poor construction.

In the face of continued anger among Bangladeshis, Home Minister Alamgir sought to quickly turn the page on this disaster. He claimed that rescue team did ”better than the average international effort in such cases” and emphasized the number of people pulled out of the rubble, not the dead and missing. But the building’s collapse was not a natural disaster. It was the result of a murderous conspiracy to disregard the potential cost in human lives in keeping the international profit machine humming.

In November of last year, a fire at Tazreen Fashions killed 121 workers and injured 200. Despite government and employer promises to rectify the situation, nothing ever came of it, and no one was ever charged. Since 2005 and before this latest disaster – the Rana Plaza collapse is considered one of the countries’ worst industrial tragedies – more than 1,000 textile workers have died in fires and collapsed buildings. According to an AFL-CIO account, since the fire at Tazreen 41 other instances of fire have occurred, killing nine workers and injuring 660. (cmc.ca/news/world/story)

Among the businesses in the Rana building were Phantom Apparels Ltd and the New Wave group which on its website named 27 main customers, including some of the biggest clothing brands such as firms from Britain (Primark), France (Carrefour), Spain (Mango), Italy (Benetton) Canada (Loblaw) and the United States (Wal-Mart). Labels of many of these companies were found strewn among the broken bodies and broken concrete.

In interviews conducted by the British charity War on Want (waronwant.org), women describe working conditions in the factories that are not only dangerous but also degrading. They tell of being slapped or beaten if they try to refuse overtime. Shifts last as long as 15 hours. Some relate that pay cheques always fall behind and when they are finally paid it is never the correct amount due them. They compare the luxurious living conditions of the factory owners to the cramped one-room shacks where they live. Their shacks are in close proximity to the multi-story factory buildings where you can see steel-reinforcing rods poking from the rooftops in preparation for the addition of that yet another floor of sewing machines.

When the U.S. instituted quota restrictions on the importation of apparel from countries like China, Indonesia, Malysia and Thailand, the growth of the garment industry in Bangladesh was given a boost. As a “least developed country” Bangladesh received preferential access to the U.S. and European Union markets. The traditionally large clothing producers relocated ready-made garment (RMG) factories to countries that were free from quota restrictions and had enough trainable cheap labour. Bangladesh was seen as a promising place for the industry to invest. Since the 1980s the RMG industry went from 4 percent of the country’s total export earnings to 80 percent today.

While that preferential treatment lasted only until 2004, the garment industry in Bangladesh became a favourite production site for many big brands. The less-than-a-living wage is $38 a month. The vast pool of available workers are mainly women, often part of a newly arrived and huge influx of people from the countryside desperately searching for whatever work they can find to support their families. In addition to the super-exploitation, the women are often sexually harassed. Despite laws against it, in the smaller sweatshops where local factories outsource work, often child labour is used.

Now Bangladesh is the world’s second largest clothing exporter, after China. Almost 4 million people are employed in more than 4,500 textile factories. The government of Sheik Hasina works hand in hand with an association of clothing manufacturers whose members include Bangladesh’s most prominent families. Her job is to protect the status quo so nothing is done that might frighten away the major clothing brands. That includes turning a blind eye to the hellish conditions created by the local factories owners who extract only a small part of the wealth generated by the super-exploitation of the garment workers. The situation in the Bangladeshi garment industry is not a throwback to the past but a defining feature of where the world is going today as globalized cheap manufacture plays an increasingly major role in the international process of capital accumulation.

Different ideas have been put forward about who is responsible and how to resolve the intolerable working conditions for garment workers. Calls have been made for more corporate responsibility, more government intervention, more fire and building inspections, more audits, more unions. Union organisers are often arrested and sometimes brutally killed. Some measures have been taken with little progress. Some NGOs and union organisers made attempts to call together the clothing industry importers to form an independent organism to monitor the various garment factories to improve safety conditions but no agreement could be reached. Now with the shame of the world cast on the name brands they have shed crocodile tears and offer some food to families of the victims.

John Hilary, executive director at War on Want, told Reuters, ”What we’re saying is that bargain-basement (clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters.” He said that Western clothing retailers’ need to undercut rivals has translated into increasing pressure on foreign suppliers to reduce costs.”If you’ve got that, then it’s absolutely clear that you’re not going to be able to have the right kind of building regulations, health and safety, fire safety. Those things will become more and more impossible as the cost price goes down.” Hilary said the push for lower costs inevitably led to factories cutting corners. “As a result of that, we see the sort of disaster that happened yesterday,” he said.

The brand name companies see the obstacles as too many and too costly to solve. Their bottom line after all is profit. If they don’t maximise profit by cutting costs one company will be devoured by another. And if profits are not made in Bangladesh, which is now part of the world imperialist market, then the companies will move to another oppressed country where they can find a suitable workforce to super-exploit. By the internal logic of capitalism, where profit and competition rule over everything, each player at every level of the trillion dollar garment industry must keep costs to a minimum to effectively beat out competitors. Further, to remain competitive and profitable today clothing retailers must be able to change styles quickly and often, with tight deadlines adding to the intense pace imposed on garment manufacturing. These economic necessities translate into the destruction of human lives and potential on a mass scale.

The deaths and injuries at Rana Plaza are not an aberration but part of the workings of a ruthless system. The sorrow and righteous anger of the Bangladeshi people is a world wide wake up call. The next time you don your clothes, look at the label and remember there is blood on it that you don’t see.

29 April 2013. A World to Win News Service. On 17 April the story broke that Greek foremen had fired shotguns and pistols at 200 mostly Bangladeshi immigrant strawberry pickers in the village of Nea Manaloda who were demanding six months back wages. The fruit has been re-dubbed “blood strawberries”, a reference to the “blood diamonds” of Sierra Leone. The vicious armed response that landed 29 in hospital, some critically wounded, shined a spotlight on conditions for migrant labour in modern Europe.

Photos posted on the Web showed the plastic sheet-roofed shelters without running water or electricity where migrant labourers from Asia and Africa sleep ten by ten. Ordinarily these structures normally “house” strawberry plants. The workers have to drink from a water hose and use a barrel for bathing. Out of the 22 euros ($29) per day they were promised for 7-8 hour shifts (which in reality are often twice that long), farmworkers have to pay “rent” to the strawberry plantation owners; they told human rights groups they must also pay the local mafia for “protection”, and have no choice but to shop for food in employer-owned small stores. Reportedly their real earnings are reduced to 5 euros a day. Others say they must dish out part of their wages to pay back the transporters who got them to Greece.

Why would Bangladeshis risk their lives to enter Europe to work as poorly or unpaid wage slaves in the fields and be treated savagely by bosses who want to exploit them and by neo-Nazis who want to deport them? Because instead of earning 38 dollars a month in a Dhaka garment factory, they are told they will make fourteen times more in capitalist Europe than at home, where imperialism has dominated and twisted those economies, plundered resources and kept wages too low to live on. They go through this usually in order to be able to send small remittances back to their families. They also may fall into the clutches of a thriving multi-billion human trafficking business in Europe that helps to lower the ‘risk’ to employers’ networks importing cheap labour.

This is modern capitalist Greece, an entryway to modern Europe, preying on the labour of very poor and mostly undocumented foreign workers. The industry calls strawberries “red gold”, but the gold comes from this exploited labour not from the fruit.

In 2008 migrant farmworkers in Manolada organised a strike protesting their conditions and demanding more money. They were violently repressed. In 2012 two plantation goons were finally arrested after they brutally beat up a 30-year-old Egyptian who had demanded to be paid his wages. They jammed his head in the window of a car door and dragged him through the village. There are also allegations that municipal officials had been selling false identity documents to migrant workers. The purpose was both to keep foreign workers in the local fields instead of moving elsewhere or going home, and let farm owners off the hook for hiring “illegals”. Some had been prosecuted for that offence rather than for paying slave wages in inhuman conditions backed by violence.

A columnist from Multicultural politic described Nea Manolada as a small village situated on the Peloponnese peninsula with “a local population of around 3,500 people, including approximately 1,500 foreign-born migrants… not only from Bangladesh, but since the 1980s also from Pakistan, Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and other Balkan countries. While most of rural Greece has been crippled by the economic depression, this town and the wider region has been going through an export boom. Nea Manolada is responsible for 90 percent of Greece’s national production of strawberries which is predominantly sold in Switzerland, Germany and Russia. The incomes for local farmers have known to have grown by 30 percent in a single year.”

In 2011 the former social democratic prime minister George Papandreou praised the Manolada “miracle” for its agricultural innovation and intensive exploitation at a Ministry of Rural Development conference, asking how it could be replicated elsewhere in Greece’s sagging economy.

Greece is “at the sharp end of the eurozone crisis”, as one report put it, and the government has been trying to fulfil conditions set by the European Union for a nine billion euro international bailout. Although it hasn’t “fallen over the cliff”, one broadcaster stated, already one in three Greeks are living below the official poverty line and unemployment is at 27 percent officially, with many working very irregular jobs. The informal sector functions according to different rules and the rural economy in Greece is known for circumventing labour laws. More than 40 percent of workers in this sector are migrants. With little or no access to basic rights, they are easy targets for merciless exploitation. This latest attack in Manolada has fanned further social outrage against the government among the already politically aroused and angry Greek population.

But at the same time, within this severe recession affecting nearly all sectors of the middle and lower strata, ultra-rightist politicians and their vigilante groups are actively spewing anti-immigrant racist venom, with open references to Hitler’s ovens. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party holds 18 seats in Parliament and vows to take political power. The rise of racist and fascist ideologies during capitalist crisis is hardly new. Targeting migrants for losses of jobs that Greeks or other Europeans often won’t perform becomes a spontaneous and malevolent reaction of those seeking an explanation and way out of the crisis but not seeing or refusing to see the system as the cause.

Despite its sharpness, neither the financial crisis nor official reactionary policies against poor immigrants that encourage popular support for racism and fascist ideas is a Greek “problem”. The UK is full of migrant cleaning women earning miserable wages; in the Netherlands the government formed a coalition that included the extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party; and France’s previous president Nicolas Sarkozy expelled 700 Roma back to Romania, although that country is a member of the EU. Spain has what are called “salad hothouses” employing vulnerable migrants, and Italy is known for its “tomato slaves”: both countries are active enforcers of the ugly, repressive blockading of large numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats to seek a better life and be exploited in the imperialist “North” that has played such a key role in skewing the development of the countries they come from.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.